Heart Beat Monitor and Arduino

I sat down to try and get this tiny device to work and quickly found this website pulse sensor.com that has a complete tutorial on turning this device into a complete heart rate monitor. An Arduino sketch and a Processing sketch provide an output like this:

The red heart beats at your heart rate. Download both the Arduino and Processing zip files and unzip them. There are a number of files in each folder, and the file needed is PulseSensorAmpd_Arduino_1dot4 the other files are automatically loaded at the same time. Upload the Arduino sketch and leave the Arduino connected to your PC, open Processing and upload the processing sketch. When you run this sketch you will see the display as shown above. I had an error when I first ran the sketch and needed to change the line
port = new Serial(this, Serial.list()[9], 115200); // make sure Arduino is talking serial at this baud rate

to
port = new Serial(this, Serial.list()[0], 115200); // make sure Arduino is talking serial at this baud rate

The website shows how to make the sensor easy to use, and I found that without shielding the output was variable. I also connected an LED between Arduino pin 5 and Gnd to show pulse rate. The LED attached to pin 13 was supposed to flash, but I did not see this.

This turned out to be a fun project and many thanks for the guys at pulse sensor.com